Monthly Archives: December 2016

What is this, a month later and I still haven’t talked about Episode 25? Well, it’s been quite a month. I’ll get into that in a moment. But first, Starchild!
This is an unabashed love letter to my wife, JR Blackwell. Doctor Mercury is her character–and that’s her posing as Mercury, underneath the layers of Photoshop in the title card–and I’ve been wanting to write something with her for awhile. Doctor Mercury was already established as part of Chris Morse’s Super Villain Corner, and having recently jumped over there, it seemed the perfect excuse to have her follow me back. Like all things my wife does, Doctor Mercury is an immaculate creation, a perfectly twisted power fantasy the likes of which fiction rarely sees. I’m not sure how much of this episode was me “writing” and how much was just letting Doctor Mercury do her thing. JR has read me her Mercury stories in that thick, delicious voice, so I getting her words on the page was surprisingly easy.

This was remarkably fun story to write. The whole “found audio” conceit allowed me to pull some actual horror around JR and my vamping. And it was nice to try my hand at some Lovecraftian-style terror, while at the same time making in feminist and, well, not racist.

Props to Sonia Williams, making her third appearance on the show, and absolutely nailing the transition from focused scientist to deranged madwoman. And simmilar props to new-comer Josh Hitchens, who I daresay is the best screamer in podcasting. Seriously, I asked that guy to just give me a scream, thinking we’d have to do a couple of takes to get the energy right, but he shook out a perfect one right out of the gate. I’ve been wanting to work with Josh for awhile, I just had to find the right character. And it seems like I made the right choice.

Speaking of collaborations with my wife…
We’re looking at an April publication date. Should be life-changing.

Speaking of life-changing, if you follow my Instagram or Twitter feed, you may have noticed I’ve stopped dressing like this:

And started dressing like this:

I’ve been experimenting with my gender identity over the past few weeks, and I’ve come to a few conclusions:

Presenting a feminine identity, both on the street and online, makes me happy. As in, “seemingly cured my depression in one fell swoop” happy. I used to view to myself as someone who had lots of different problems, but it looks like I just had one problem that affected me in lots of different ways.

I’m not changing my name. You can continue to refer to me as “Jared.”

I haven’t come down on specific pronoun preference, yet. “He” is fine, I’m still testing the weight of “she,” and I’ve never had a problem with the singular “they.” So, really, all pronouns are fine.

I do intend to keep wearing ties.

Whether this a wholesale shift in my gender from male to female, or just some genderqueer wardrobe additions remains to be seen. I’m still exploring this, and there’s no real map to speak of. But the journey has been nothing but positive so far, so I’m content to continue on and see where I end up.

Jared Axelrod is an author, an illustrator, and a world changer. Through out her eventful life she has also been a circus performer, a puppeteer, a graphic designer, a sculptor, a costume designer, a podcaster and quite a few other things that she’s lost track of but will no doubt remember when the situation calls for it. But that “author’ business, that seems to be one she keeps coming back to.